Watched this today.

Do you think it's a documentary or a prankumentary?

What is it?

Your basic "Documentary turns out to be more about the documentarian than about the original subjects" taken to the extreme. Someone is doing a documentary on graffiti artists but then one of the graffiti artists takes over and makes the film about the documentarian.

The controversy is that some say that the main character is a construct and that it's more fiction than reality.

It works either way. Banksy (the graffiti artist) gets his point across.

I watched this on Netflix tonight and found it brilliant. It occurred to me that this is possibly (likely) Banksy art and not reality, but it all comes across as so damn true. Highly recommend this.

Thierry Guetta kinda reminded me of Rob Liefeld at the end there.

I thought this movie was a bit over-rated. Frankly I didn't care for how it glorified these graffiti artists who illegally mark up private property with their usually very ugly designs. I lived in NYC for 20 years and that crap always made the city look worse in my eyes, it's just as bad as littering to me, and harder to clean up. There's publishing, private shows and even the internet these days, If you want your artwork to get out there, do it some other way than plastering over the side of a building that you don't own in the dark of night.

The first thing I was taught in Sociology class many years ago,
the very first thing the instructor wanted us to know, was
grafitti is the first sign of a declining society.
The proliferation of grafitti graphs the decaying of a society
from civilized all the way to savage.

I don't like tagging and ugly graffiti, but which is worse?

The crumbling facade or the illegal art?



The parking lot or the commentary?



The top image or the bottom?



Not everyone can do what Banksy does, but I find his work very compelling.

I fully support any artists' right to self expression
when they use media they own or have the owner's permission to use.
Otherwise, no matter how beautiful, poignant, clever or brilliant, it's defacing.
When nobody cares about defacing, it's a first step on the slippery slope of not caring about lots of thing.

aNd eef u r nott car ing aboot lotz of tings, may bee you are nott car ring about many thingz to!

Where I live some people have even made an effort to imitate him a bit......except there are no crumbling facades around,so they do it on buildings where some poor guy has to pay to have it cleaned up. They only get lucky if the owner is having money problems and can't get rid of it right away.

It is the argument "what is art?" taken to the extreme. Yes, I have a bone to pick with most graffiti artists, altho I put them into two categories - taggers who basically piss on the world and have to be cleaned up behind and artists like Banksie and Fairey who take a neglected space and make it something more. (I did witness Fairey pasting stickers all over the neighborhood - he did his best to make them nearly impossible to remove and that did piss me off) We have a couple of local artists whose work is left in place and add to the arts district. They take care to place them in interesting spots - like Uncle Sam eavesdropping on a phone booth.

Warhol is the first who made graphics into art and reused popular images in unconventional ways, iconifying them. That essentially gave permission to others to do similar things. And now we have someone like Rob Wasshisname appropriating artwork, adding a splash of paint and claiming it as his own. So, what is art?

Is art a commodity governed by supply and demand? In the short term, perhaps. In the long term art just is. It is finite, as the artist eventually ceases to produce, thus the supply ends. The value is then governed by taste, reputation and desirability. The documentary very well captured the hype of the art world. It will most likely collapse, save for the notoriety.